May 29, 2026 — A national environmental organization Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for failing to protect American horseshoe crabs under the Endangered Species Act.
The Center for Biological Diversity is among more than two dozen organizations that petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect horseshoe crabs in 2024.
May 21, 2026 — In the year since President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to create a deep-sea mining industry from scratch, businesses have raised millions of dollars from investors, stock prices have soared and federal regulators have raced to fast-track a permitting process.
At least nine companies are in talks with the government for access to seabed minerals, according to an Associated Press review. Sections of the seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska could be auctioned for offshore mining this summer and through the fall.
All the action suggests the U.S. may soon give the green light for companies to commercially mine the seabed — something that’s never been done in international waters.
But a close look at some of the companies involved reveals uncertain track records and histories spattered with legal disputes, while major questions about how the minerals would be processed and refined remain unanswered. Watchers of the nascent industry are skeptical the promised riches will ever materialize.
May 21, 2026 — Forty-Two Acres of vacant industrial land — a patchwork of asphalt, weeds, and grass — sit waiting in Salem’s harbor. In the center is a coal power plant, shut down in 2014 after a decade of community activism, and a natural gas plant, retired in 2018. The city identified the lot, roughly 30 football fields in size, to be the site for Salem’s offshore wind terminal, which would be the third in the state after the New Bedford Marine Commerce Terminal opened in 2015 and the city began its phased opening of the Foss Marine Terminal in 2023.
But strong political winds have, at least for now, changed the course for Salem.
For the city’s climate advocates, the prospective terminal represents decades of work toward a cleaner, renewable energy future, one that the state has been putting money and policy behind for years and that has promised to bring thousands of jobs and other community investments. Salem and New Bedford both received millions from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to develop the sites of retired fossil fuel power plants into terminals that would serve as logistics and operations centers for the construction of offshore wind. But wind projects have long been struggling to get off the ground. During the Biden administration, global supply chain disruption, climbing inflation, and high interest rates drove up costs for developers. The Trump administration’s anti-wind actions — issuing executive orders that block new projects, pausing existing leases, and rescinding grants — drove both cities further from the economic boon they expected.
In New Bedford, the influx of tenants that was hoped for never materialized. In Salem, the plan was to build two berths to receive ships carrying crew and materials for wind projects. But construction is stalled and there’s no start date in sight.
“We expected a lot of jobs, like a lot of life-changing … career sustainable jobs that were going to come from this, and that’s what hasn’t materialized,” said Sam Lambert, deputy chapter director for the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts’ chapter, of the Salem terminal and the offshore wind projects it might have supported.
In New Bedford, the terminal has had to shift its vision. It’s leaning on general cargo and marine construction for additional revenue.
“We were operating under a plan where, when the first [wind farm] gets first electricity, it would start doing its operation and maintenance work out of our facility,” said Andrew Saunders, president of the New Bedford Foss Marine Terminal. But with the current political climate, “the terminal has had to pivot in order to generate revenue, and figure out something of a different identity.”
May 20, 2026 — Atlantic fishermen could be allowed to catch even more sharks, if the Trump administration’s newly proposed updates to fishing regulations are approved.
The regulations would impact protections for the endangered blacknose shark, which has seen its population cut by more than half over the last quarter of a century. They would also raise the number of sharks recreational fishermen can catch per species and alter how big the sharks that are caught need to be.
The proposed changes are necessary to make it easier for recreational and commercial fishermen in the Atlantic Ocean by reducing the shark population, the administration says.
May 19, 2026 — Few energy companies have navigated the Trump era like NextEra Energy.
The White House selected the Florida-based power giant to build a pair of massive natural gas plants in Pennsylvania and Texas in March, as part of a wider $550 billion trade deal with Japan. But even as NextEra embraced President Donald Trump’s call for more gas, its executives made clear during their quarterly appearances before financial analysts that they believed renewables and batteries are the quickest ways to meet soaring energy demands from data centers.
Now, NextEra’s proposed $67 billion merger with Virginia-based Dominion Energy stands to test those competing strategies on the front lines of artificial intelligence.
May 14, 2026 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has asked the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) to abandon a rule forcing commercial herring fishers to pay for at-sea monitors out of pocket.
“After careful consideration, we have determined that an action removing Atlantic herring monitoring requirements […] may be warranted to remove unused provisions that are not achieving their intended goals and, thereby, reduce regulatory burdens on Atlantic herring fishery participants,” NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator Eugenio Piñeiro Soler said in a 1 May letter to the council. “Because the herring [industry-funded monitor] program imposes costs on [NOAA Fisheries] as well as the herring industry itself in order to be effectively implemented, in the face of declining resources and the need to prioritize our activities to support the Administration’s goals and objectives of Executive Order 14276, it is unlikely that [NOAA Fisheries] will have the resources necessary to support this program.”
May 14, 2026 — A group of conservation organizations have filed a request to defend vessel speed limits designed to protect North Atlantic right whales from a legal challenge, questioning U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s willingness to fully defend the regulation in court.
“With lawmakers and the Trump administration trying to delay right whale safeguards for another decade, preserving the Vessel Speed Rule is more important than ever,” Conservation Law Foundation Senior Counsel Erica Fuller said in a release. “This rule is the only one that protects the few remaining right whales from vessel strikes. Weakening it would be a reckless abandonment of our responsibility to protect endangered marine life and the health of our oceans for generations to come.”
May 11, 2026 — A group of conservation organizations has launched a lawsuit against the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in response to his reopening of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument to commercial fishing.
Trump revoked restrictions on commercial fishing in the monument in February, marking the fourth time that the status of commercial fishing in the region changed since the monument was first created by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016. At this point, the monument has seen three different presidents make four different management decisions, with each decision being met by lawsuits by either fishing groups opposing commercial fishing closures or environmental groups suing over the monument being reopened again.
May 7, 2026 — The Trump administration is pressuring regional officials to roll back a monitoring program for Atlantic herring fisheries, reversing course on regulations that sparked the legal battle that upended the Chevron doctrine.
NOAA Fisheries chief Eugenio Piñeiro Soler outlined the directive in a May 1 letter to the New England Fishery Management Council, the regional agency charged with creating management plans and setting catch limits.
Pointing to an executive order on “seafood competitiveness” issued by President Donald Trump in 2025, Soler directed the council to reverse an earlier decision to leave the monitoring program in place. He warned that failing to do so might spur involvement by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
May 7, 2026 — A coalition of environmental groups has filed suit against the Trump administration over its move to reopen the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, reigniting a long-running battle over access to the protected Atlantic waters.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by the Conservation Law Foundation, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity, along with whale-watch naturalist Zack Klyver, challenged President Trump’s February proclamation allowing commercial fishing within the monument boundaries